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World
history has often been told from the top down, with a focus on large-scale
political and economic processes carried out by government and commercial
leaders. This collection of seven essays takes the "bottom up" approach of
social history to examine the ways that ordinary people "have driven global
processes and shaped the direction and the character of connectivity at many
scales" (3) through dissent, disruption, revolt, organization, and other
actions. It asks readers "to imagine a world history narrative in which
agitators, rebels, strikers, insurgents, and unorthodox visionaries of all
kinds are at the center" (5), with thematic chapters that stretch from the
mid-eighteenth century to the present. Each chapter examines individuals and
developments in several places around the world, and explores how these were
interconnected through the movement of people, ideas, and symbols. The editors
and many of the authors are well-known scholar-activists, but most of chapters
are not triumphalist stories of Great Radicals of the Past, but careful
investigations of movements that succeeded and failed, and the men and women who
led and participated in them.
The
first three chapters focus on what we usually think of as the political realm. In
Chapter One, "Modern Political Revolutions: Connecting Grassroots Political
Dissent and Global Historical Transformations," M.J. Maynes and Ann Waltner do just what their subtitle says they
will, in a smoothly-written narrative that makes comparisons and traces connections,
both key methods in world history. Some of these comparisons and connections will
be familiar, but some not, such as their integration of what happened in Java
in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century into what is usually told
as an Atlantic World story of France and Haiti. They include excellent
illustrations of prints and photographs, with captions that contextualize them
so that these could be used for assignments in image analysis. In Chapter Two,
"International and Global Anti-colonial Movements," Heather Streets-Salter
examines the global links within three movements, again choosing some examples
that may be familiar, such as international Communism and pan-Islam, but one
that will probably not, the Ghadar party of
revolutionary Indian nationalists that was organized by Indian expatriates in
the United States. Comparing their aims and actions to those of the
Gandhi-centered story of the Indian National Congress found in most world
history textbooks would help students recognize some of the complexities of the
fight against colonialism. In Chapter Three, "Insurgent Citizenships: Armed
Rebellions and Everyday Acts of Resistance in the Global South," Eileen Ford
presents a series of examples, organized regionally, but spends too much time
justifying her approach, arguing against assumptions that student readers may
well not have, and envisioning her readers as their instructors or more
traditional historians instead.
The
last four chapters are more thematic. In Chapter Four, "Body Politics,
Sexualities, and the 'Modern Family' in Global History," Durba Ghosh highlights five what she calls "moments" that both made and challenged
hegemonic ideas about familial, bodily, and sexual practices. She notes the
role of governments, scholars, and the church in defining what was and what was
not a family, but pays particular attention to non-monogamous and
non-heteronormative relationships, and gender-nonconforming individuals. Her
view of gender fluidity in the premodern period is a bit too rosy, but the
discussion will help students understand that trans was not a category invented
yesterday in the United States. In Chapter Five, "The Persistence of the Gods:
Religion in the Modern World," Tony Ballantyne provides a counter-narrative to
the standard story of secularization in the modern world, with examples that
highlight ways that religion remained a central factor in social life and an
arena for struggles over power. He examines Protestant evangelism, prophetic
movements among Native Americans and South Africans, the Rastafari movement,
efforts to systematize Sikhism, Judaism, and Catholicism, Muslim
internationalism, and ends with a brief look at fundamentalism. Most world
history textbooks largely drop religion out of their narratives after the
sixteenth century as they try to fit in all that politics and economics, so
this chapter would be an especially helpful one to include as additional
reading in any course on the modern world. In Chapter Six, "Global Mobilities," Clare Anderson examines how insurgency moved
around the world through the movements of enslaved peoples, convicts, and
indentured labor, who formed communities and protested, mutinied, and revolted
as they moved. She notes that migration studies have placed too great an
emphasis on Europeans who settled elsewhere, and not enough on Asians (and
others) who sojourned in temporary migrations, and have often ignored the fact
that much migration today remains coerced.
Chapter
Seven, "The Anthropocene from Below," by three authors, is quite different from
the others in the book. Most of the chapter is an overview of concepts of the
Anthropocene and debates among physical and biological scientists about when it
started. This includes some specialized scientific language, but would be an
excellent brief introduction to the issue for history students at all levels,
with useful graphs that depict changes visually. The last part of the chapter
discusses the experience of climate change for poor communities around the
world, the politicization of climate science in the U.S., and grass-roots
efforts to combat global warming and work for climate justice. World historians
are increasingly focusing on human impacts on the environment across the longue durée—the environment was a theme of the 2014 World
History Association conference in Costa Rica and the Anthropocene will be a
theme for the 2018 WHA conference in Milwaukee—and this chapter fits with that
emphasis.
Most
of the chapters in this fine collection would work very well in the
undergraduate classroom, and some perhaps for Advanced Placement courses as
well. Each chapter chooses a small group of examples or moments to focus on,
with brief mention of others, so students won't get buried in a mass of names
and dates. The book as a whole could be assigned in thematic upper-level or
graduate courses, both for its content and for the examples that the chapters
provide about how to write comparative and world/global history on a specific
topic in a research-paper length format. Because many of its examples are not
ones often discussed, more advanced scholars of world history would gain by
reading the book as well.
Merry Wiesner-Hanks is Distinguished Professor of History
at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the Vice-President of the World
History Association. She can be reached at merrywh@uw.edu |
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